By Patrick O'Grady
maddogmedia at gmail dot com

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Can you hear me now? How about now? Now?

  Hee haw. Qwest will be providing phone and internet services during the Democratic National Convention in Denver. The Donks better lay in some log drums, signal flares and semaphore flags for backup. My "new and improved" DSL modem is cutting out on me at least once daily — never for long, but still, when that internet light goes dark and Qwest is running the shop, a guy never knows whether he's gonna be spending the day at the coffee shop with a gaggle of chattering soccer moms.

  Meanwhile, I enjoyed another stellar bit of customer service yesterday, from a once-efficient Mac dealer, MacMall. I decided to replace my doddering old G4 with a 2GHz Mini and ordered one up, instructing MacMall to double the stock RAM, to 2GB. RAM installations and other tweaks are pretty easy on most Macs — I've been under the hood of all of mine at one time or another, barring the MacBook — but the Minis are said to be a pain in the ass to work on, and Apple even recommends that customers don't try to install their own RAM upgrades, so I wanted someone else to drive himself apeshit with that little project.

  When the e-mail confirming my order arrived, it listed the Mini as en route and the RAM installation as "in process," a physical impossibility for anyone who isn't Dr. Strange. When I checked my order online, the Mini again showed as shipped but the RAM order had been "canceled by customer." Ay yi yi. A 25-minute chat with various customer-service pootbutts ensued, during which I learned that the RAM was apparently out of stock — so, naturally, MacMall shipped the Mini anyway.

  "This is not the product I ordered," I explained, over and over again. "Let me put you on hold while I check your order," the servo-bots replied tinnily, over and over again. Finally I lost interest and canceled the order, refusing delivery when UPS showed up with the RAM-challenged Mini. At least this time the Brown Truck Dude wasn't bringing me another fucking DSL modem from Qwest.

  Qwest for brains revisited: After losing our Internet hookup a half-dozen times this morning, forcing Herself to have to keep logging back into her VPN, I rang up the propeller-heads at Qwest for another enjoyable chat that involved a hard reset and yet another laborious configuration, with multiple restarts, of our modem, a Motorola Netopia 3347 that doesn't look anything like the models on the Netopia site and may be cobbled together from a WWII-era Japanese Army walkie-talkie, a Captain Midnight secret decoder ring and a ball of aluminum foil. The sonofabitch is working now — but it was working before, too, until suddenly it wasn't. It's days like this when I wish I had a real job, with IT support, so that when the shit monsoon hit I could say fuck it and go out for a drink of lunch.

  This just in: And now, as a change of pace for all you fans of human suffering, we present The Segway faceplant. I can only hope she worked for Qwest or Motorola. Thanks and a tip of the skid lid to the tosspots at DrunkCyclist.

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Splish, splash

  The Bibleburg Gaslight says we've gotten 2.45 inches of rain since Thursday — nearly a third of the year's total to date of 6.7 inches. It sounds like a lot, but we're still well shy of the usual precip', which would be 12.8 inches by now.

  Don't mention drought to the folks who ran the Pikes Peak Ascent yesterday, though. They ran through drizzle, hail, snow and fog, and more than half the starters did not finish. Eighty of the 760 finishers were treated for hypothermia. This is what some people call "fun." Me, I'll take a Tia Sophia breakfast burrito smothered in green and a long soak at Ten Thousand Waves, thanks all the same. 'Course, you can't get either of those things here. A guy has to drive four hours south to Santa Fe for that action.

  Speaking of which, I won't be enjoying my usual extended romp through the Southwest this fall en route to Interbike. I skipped the big trade show last year for the first time since 1993 or thereabouts, and my absence was so popular with the authorities at Bicycle Retailer & Industry News that I have been invited to do likewise this year. Too bad, so sad. It would be fun to spectate beerily at CrossVegas, and one of these years I'd like to spend a couple days playing with all the new toys at Outdoor Demo, but not if it means buying my own gas, grub and grog.

  In related news, don't be surprised when you don't see any Mud Stud cartoons in BRAIN's Show Daily at I-bike. I did 'em from a distance last year, but it seems that they constitute another crushing expense deemed too onerous in these trying times. Those folks running the show in Laguna Hills get any tighter, they're liable to squeak when they walk. 'Course, if I were running a magazine with fewer pages than the White House ethics manual, I might be cutting down on expenses, too.

  Hey, what can I tell you? More time for riding the bike, I hope. Getting out lately has been difficult when not impossible, but yesterday I found a 45-minute window between deluges for a short run, and today I got out for an hour on the Steelman and only got a little bit dampish.

  But September also brings the Vuelta a España, the Tour of Missouri and a whole bunch of other bikey-stuff that requires the creation and relocation of pixels in quantity, so I suspect I will not be short of excuses for not riding. Ho, ho. As if an Irish-American layabout with a whisky fetish ever needed an excuse to sprawl on the sofa for an extended bout of eyelid inspection.

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Super soaker

  After a couple months of heat and drought, zango: The rains came. And with a vengeance, too. It's been raining for a couple days straight now, and I think I just saw Noah go Arking on by, with Ted Haggard as cabin boy. Maybe Jimmy Dobson's mob got an early start on praying for rain of biblical proportions to spoil Barack Obama's little party in Denver. Uh, that's still a few days down the road, y'all. And anyway, better a little cleansing rain than what we usually get out of the local sky pilots.

  And speaking of roads, a 5.5-mile stretch of Interstate 25 will be closed to the little people when Obama makes it official Aug. 28 at Invesco Field. C'mon, folks — is this really necessary? And we wonder how politicians come to gain inflated notions of their own importance relative to their fellow citizens. Don't tell me the right-wing bombast machine isn't going to have big fun with this news, while conveniently forgetting to mention how Daffy and Fudd jet around with fighter escorts, armored limos and missile batteries in case someone dares show Daffy a middle digit or Fudd decides he feels like shooting an old pal in the face.

  And while the Queen City of the Plains bids welcome to the Donks' anticlimactic little $40.6 million bash — which includes a mandate that caterers provide food in "at least three of the following five colors: red, green, yellow, blue/purple and white" — anyone expressing a preference for, say, brown or pink sustenance is likely to wind up in Denver's secret slammer, a "dilapidated warehouse" (have you ever noticed that in hack writing, warehouses are always dilapidated?) that once housed the city's voting machines. Says protester Glenn Spagnuolo:

"This facility has a long history. The city pulled its voting machines from here because the building gets too hot. Yet now they'll put people in there who use those machines to vote. There are no toilets there. There's no water, no fire suppression. The city should be ashamed. It needs to stop criminalizing protests."

  Hey, Glenn old scout, this is Colorado. If we're not ashamed of Jimmy Dobson, Doug Bruce, Marilyn Musgrave and the Broncos, we're sure as hell not going to get all worked up over a few balding hippies stuffed into dog kennels. Cowboy up, son. Nobody ever heard of the Chicago Seven complaining about the accommodations.

  Meanwhile, from Jonathan S. Landay of McClatchy comes the lede of the week regarding President Kettle's calling Premier Pot black:

WASHINGTON — President Bush declared Friday that the United States and its allies "stand with the people" of war-torn Georgia against Russian "bullying and intimidation." He then left Washington for a 10-day vacation at his Texas ranch.

  Unintentionally ironic bluster aside, the Rooskies don't appear to be going anywhere, unlike the Chickenshit-in-Chief, which must have Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili thinking about changing the name of George W. Bush Street in Tbilisi to something more appropriate, like Up Shit Creek Avenue, You're On Your Own Boulevard or The Russians Are Coming Road.

  And finally, a happy birthday to Charles Bukowski. In addition to being a hugely entertaining writer and poet, Bukowsky was at least part of the inspiration for one of my favorite Tom Waits songs, "Frank's Wild Years." Said Waits: "Bukowski had a story that essentially was saying that it's the little things that drive men mad. It's not World War II. It's the broken shoe lace when there is no time left that sends men completely out of their minds. I think there is a little bit of Frank in everybody."

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Qwest for brains

  "Against stupidity the very gods themselves contend in vain," wrote Johann Christoph Friendrich von Schiller in "The Maid of Orleans." He must have had Internet service from Qwest.

  We have had a land line and DSL service with Qwest for several years, and while the service and hardware both seemed overpriced, at least they mostly functioned as required. True, we had a few confusing chats with East Asian tech-support people early in the relationship, and blew up an ActionTec Wireless-Ready DSL Gateway modem a few gigabytes further down the road, but all went more or less swimmingly until the second ActionTec went south in the exact same fashion last week.

  That way, as the saying goes, lies madness.

  When the DSL went down on Thursday, Aug. 7, I called tech support. Dead modem, they diagnosed; we're trying to get all those old ActionTecs out of customers' hands anyway. We will send you, with all haste, the very latest in Qwest communications technology. Agreed. Deal done, I hung up.

  Then I was afflicted with an idea — as usual, a bad one. I called the Qwest folks back and said, cancel that delivery, I'll just pop on by my local Qwest store and fetch home a new modem, save you the trouble and me the delay. We can't be without high-speed Intertubes for 24 hours. There are words to be processed, libels to be transmitted. Right you are, sir, they replied, and off I went.

  My antennae should have tingled when it took three of the four boneheads working the Qwest kiosk at the Citadel Mall to find me a new modem and enter the appropriate data into their computer. Alarm bells should have begun clanging when one of these wankers proposed kicking my download speed up a few notches as long as I was standing around, flattening my feet and watching the parade of thugs, slugs and Repugs. Klaxons should have begun hooting when the checkout process took longer than the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

  But no. It had been a long week, and I was tired, cranky and in a hurry. All I wanted was to be able to get back to downloading choppy videos of Tijuana donkey shows and e-mailing them to Laura Bush. So I grabbed the new modem and fled.

  Setup was something of a bother; the instructions only covered Ethernetting a computer to the modem, and we're an all-wireless family, so several chats with tech support ensued before I finally got things up and running again, just in time for happy hour.

  And then, at 10 a.m. Tuesday, Aug. 12, the DSL croaked again. This was not the third bum modem — it was Qwest, shutting off my old high-speed service in preparation for starting up my new high-speed service. This apparently can take as long as three business days, a downside to the service upgrade that nobody discussed with me, though they did manage to sell me the wrong modem for the new service — and deliver me two more just like it — before finally shipping the proper model.

  In the meantime, I am shouting down various tech-support and customer-service wells and getting a different tale each time. That 2Wire Gateway modem should work. No, it won't. Your service will be up and running Tuesday. No, Thursday. No, Wednesday. Sorry, we cannot compensate you for your time spent decoding our outrageous fucktardery, mendacity and apathy. OK, we'll give you a free modem for your trouble. No, thanks, I already have four of the god-damned things and a free modem was part of the original deal! Yaaaaaarrrrrghhhh!!!

  Long story short, after two days during which I grew a callus on one ear from being on hold, where a soothing voice told me over and over again how awesome Qwest was and how important I was to Qwest, we finally have our DSL up and running again.

  Well, kind of. None of our "Classic"-OS Macs can use the new modem, and Herself is on the horn with tech support at Brother, trying to figure out how to make her MFC-885CW printer-scanner-fax combo work with the sonofabitch. But at least Laura's finally gonna get that donkey video.

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Qwest for fire

  No, I'm not dead yet. But my DSL is, thanks to the lower primates at Qwest, who have managed to FUBAR my access to the Intertubes in the course of providing me with a new modem and a higher speed. Ook ook ook, as they say.

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Russian roulette

  An illegitimate leadership orders the invasion of a sovereign nation on the pretext of preventing war crimes against civilians — and whaddaya know? For a change, it isn't us. James Traub has an interesting backgrounder at The New York Times; thanks to Kevin Drum for the tip. Happily, we have nothing to fear — Darth Cheney is handling foreign affairs while Alfred E. "Worry" Bush is spanking the little chimp at the Olympics.

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Riders down

  Two Colorado Cyclist employees were killed Wednesday evening when a motorist apparently drove her one-ton pickup into a small group of cyclists on a training ride, according to local police and press reports.

  The two were Edgar "E.J." Juarez, 30, of Chicago, and Jayson Kilroy, 28, of the Detroit area. Both worked in phone sales at Colorado Cyclist, according to sales director Mike Creed Sr.

  "It's been a very tough day," said Creed, who had to identify Kilroy's body at the coroner's office. "Going to identify Jayson's body last night was something I'll never get over. These were both great guys. It's senseless. An absolutely senseless tragedy."

  According to a report Thursday in the Colorado Springs Gazette, Barbara Thomas, 63, was driving up 26th Street in a 1986 Ford F-350 at about 7:40 p.m. when she turned left onto a diagonal side street, Westend Avenue, reportedly striking the two cyclists. Creed said the two had been in front of another group descending 26th Street as part of a Wednesday-night group ride.

  Thomas was said to be facing charges including vehicular homicide, driving under the influence of drugs (prescription meds), failure to yield, and driving with a restricted license. A local television station reported that Thomas was driving without corrective lenses as her license required. A mug shot shows her with oxygen tubes in her nostrils.

  The 26th Street climb is a popular out-and-back cycling route that rises past Fairview Cemetery, dips briefly near the Bear Creek Nature Center and then ascends Gold Camp Road. The return leg can be rapid and dangerous, and is renowned for its "optional" stop signs; I've had a couple good scares descending 26th from Gold Camp Road as motorists pulled California stops at side streets below Fairview Cemetery, and know at least one cyclist who has gotten drilled good and hard at 26th and Bott.

  A smart lawyer will no doubt mention that the riders were descending 26th Street shortly before sundown, in a light rain, but police said the weather was not a contributing factor.

  "There is no evidence to suggest that the cycling group or the deceased cyclists were operating their bicycles in a manner that contributed to the crash, and it appears they were lawfully in the roadway and following applicable laws," a Colorado Springs Police Department spokesman told KKTV. "There was a light rain falling at the time of the crash, but it does not appear to be a contributing factor in the accident."

  Creed says an escorted memorial ride is planned this evening at 9 p.m., leaving from Wooglin's Deli on North Tejon and riding to the site of the crash. I was up there earlier today, shooting these pictures of the intersection, and a neighborhood motorist called out to me as I clicked away.

  "Is this where those kids were hit?" she asked.

  "Yes," I replied.

  "Terrible," she said, shaking her head, then drove away.

 

Late update: Another follow-up from the Gazette.

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Bikes, schmikes: Take a limo

  Denver's not a half-bad town to ride a bicycle in, even if you're a Republican — so how come bicycles will not be allowed within the "perimeter" established at the Pepsi Center by organizers of the Democratic National Convention? Hybrids, si, but bicycles, no? Maybe the locals are afraid that out-of-towners will get an up-close-and-personal look at the typical Colorado motorist, whose attitude regarding two-wheeled transport not blessed by the Harley Davidson emblem is not far removed from that of his cousins in Salt Lake City. One of these days a fed-up cyclist with a firearms fetish is gonna jerk a Glock 26 out of a jersey pocket and send one of these fucktards to Jesus the hard way.

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Don't pay the ransom . . .

  . . . I've escaped. A few of you have tweaked me over the recent dearth of postings, and in my own defense I will say only that I am a lazy, mannerless, unprincipled swine, and I will be happy to refund the price of your subscription to my site if you will give me unfettered access to your bank accounts. C'mon, you can trust me — I'm with the media.

  The news has been so evil of late that only Beelzebub could possibly take any pleasure in reviewing it, so let's just say that John McCain is scraping the bottom of the Repuglicunt septic tank in his attempts to smear Barack Obama and still getting a free pass from the press; Ron Suskind's new book says the White House once ordered the CIA to forge a letter showing a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda; and four trackies on the U.S. cycling team endeared themselves to their Chinese hosts at the Beijing Olympics by wearing face masks against the city's fabled pollution as they arrived for the Games.

  That last story was the lede Olympic piece at The New York Times for a bit, thus enhancing the popular image of cyclists as fearless, macho athletes who shave their legs and soil themselves at the first whiff of a scooter fart. Me, I want to know whether the rhythmic-gymnastics team was wearing masks when they arrived. If they were, well, then everything's cool, 'cause we know how hard that crowd is.

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